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In 1908, her only daughter, my grandmother, immigrated to the United States and found work in the Victor Talking Machine factory.

The astounding success of Italian tenor Enrico Caruso was enabled by Victor Talking Machine Co., which came to be under the umbrella of RCA Records, now home to artists such as Miley Cyrus, Childish Gambino and Alicia Keys.

Among his holdings are a volume of crucial operatic recordings made by Gianni Bettini, an audiophile-inventor based in New York; more than 400 releases by the United States Phonograph Co., an early label based in New Jersey that issued cylinders by many “first generation” recording artists; and a wild range of cylinders from America’s oldest-known regional record labels — Lambert, the Kansas City Talking Machine Co.,

By 1922, the company had won a landmark court case against Victor Talking Machine Co. that toppled the patent monopoly on lateral-cut discs, which could be played on a larger number of phonographs.

So novel was the talking machine that many people refused to believe in its existence—understandably, since, up to that point in history, sound had been entirely ephemeral.